Remember Rwanda?

Remember Rwanda?

The genocide of 1994 seemed inexplicable. But a study of
links between extreme environmental degradation and the enormous violence that
occurred between Hutus and Tutsis could have important implications for
stressed populations in other regions.

Editor's Introduction

On April 6, 1994, a plane carrying the presidents of two
African countries was struck by a missile and crashed. Both presidents-Juvenal Habyarimana of Rwanda
and Cyprian Ntaryamira of Burundi-were killed. Both were members of the Hutu
ethnic group. Counting the murder of Burundi's president Melchior Ndadaye the
previous October, a total of three Hutu presidents had been assassinated in six
months.

The crash of the plane was described by a Rwandan official
as being "like pouring fuel on a burning house." The country exploded into
genocidal conflict between the Hutu and the rival Tutsi, who had been out of
power in Rwanda but who had established a base in neighboring Uganda from which
they had been launching attacks against the regime that had ousted them. Hutu
bands killed large numbers of Tutsi in an effort to forestall the invasion. But
within weeks, the Tutsi regained control and waged retaliatory attacks on the
Hutu, hundreds of thousands of whom were by then fleeing the country.

The exchanges of massacres were so horrific that people in
other parts of the world, who had paid little attention to Rwanda until news of
the genocide broke, were bewildered as to what could have caused such fury. The
conflict was portrayed in the media as one of deep ethnic hatred. But to those
who were on the scene during the years preceding, the story is far more
complicated than that. The real causes of the blowup are rooted in a
half-century history of rapid population growth, land degradation, inequitable
access to resources, political power struggles, famine, and betrayal.

James Gasana, who was Rwanda's Minister of Agriculture and
Environment in 1990-92, and Minister of Defense in 1992-93, at one point tried
to warn his government of the coming conflagration (see page 29), but to no
avail. In the following article, adapted from a paper he wrote for the IUCN's
Task force on Environment and Security, he analyzes what happened as
environmental and economic decline set the stage for a social collapse. It's a
story that has important implications not only for Rwanda, but for every region
where population pressure threatens to exceed what the resource base can
maintain.

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Before the end of the 1950s, it was the Tutsis who dominated
Rwanda, both sociologically and politically. Tutsis constituted only 10 to 15
percent of the population, but they owned most of the arable land and accounted
for more than 95 percent of the chiefs and 88 percent of the bureaucracy. In 1959,
however, a revolution by the Hutu peasants of southern Rwanda brought the Hutu
to power and resulted in a redistribution of land to previously landless
people. Many of the Tutsi aristocracy fled to neighboring countries,
particularly to Uganda, from which they launched counter-attacks against the
Rwandan regime in the 1960s.

The Hutu, enforcing a one-party regime in which the Tutsi
had no voice, lived from then on with the specter of counter-revolution. The
hostilities between the two groups were exacerbated by the Cold War, as the
Communist countries helped arm the counter-attacks of the Tutsi refugees, while
the Western countries provided support to the the Hutu regime.

In 1973, under pressure from both internal dissent and
external attack, the regime was toppled by a coup d'état. Major General J.
Habyarimana, supported by a northern faction of the army, took control from the
southern-based group that had progressively assumed power after independence in
1962. Habyarimana was to hold power for the next 20 years, but under
increasingly difficult conditions. It's the story of those two decades that
explains the otherwise incomprehensible events of 1994.

The story begins
with a country undergoing a population explosion that was to increase it from
1,887,000 people in 1948 to 7,500,000 in 1992-making it the most densely
populated country in Africa. Most of the people were poor farmers, and in the
1980s, many of the poor got even poorer, as a result of what I call
"pembenization"-from the Swahili word "pembeni," or "aside," as used in the
Rwandan expression "gushyira i pembeni"-"to push aside."

One of the root causes of pembenization was, ironically, the
land tenure program established by the 1959 revolution as a means of giving the
peasants a more equitable share in the country's assets. The revolutionaries
did not foresee what would happen as children inherited their parents' land and
divided it up equally. With the population expanding, the inherited pieces-many
of them very small to begin with-got smaller.

At the same time, the land holdings of the elite who were in
power got larger, as wealthy northern Hutus and their allies spent much of the
1970s and 1980s accumulating land for their own estates. Of course, this
further reduced the amount of land available for peasant farmers. Many of the
peasants moved to marginal land-to steep slopes and acidic soil, where crops
barely grew. By 1989, an estimated 50 percent of Rwanda's cultivated land was
on slopes of 10 degrees or higher. Slopes this steep eroded severely when
tilled, and the cycle of poverty worsened (see Table 1).

By 1990, the erosion was washing away the equivalent of
8,000 hectares per year, or enough to feed about 40,000 people for a year.
Moreover, because demand for land outstripped supply, virtually all the
cultivatable land (other than that being hoarded by the elite) was being used,
and there was little opportunity to let fields lie fallow and regenerate. As a
result, soil fertility declined faster yet.

Of course, as population grew, the demand for energy
increased as well. Rwanda has been heavily dependent on biomass for energy-either wood or crop waste. Most of the
energy in those years was provided by firewood. But with more people trying to
get more firewood from smaller pieces of land, the country's trees were
disappearing at an increasing rate. Deforestation on the steep-sloped lands
made the ground more exposed to running water, and increased erosion still
more.

In 1991, we estimated that annual tree growth would allow
for about 1.9 million cubic meters of wood to be cut. Yet, actual wood
consumption by then had reached nearly 4.5 million cubic meters. This heavy
overharvesting had yet another impact on farm output: with the firewood supply
diminishing, people were forced to increase their reliance on straw and other
crop residues for fuel. That meant the residues were no longer going back into
the soil. The loss amounted to approximately 1.7 tons of organic matter per
hectare each year.

The compounding of all these factors led to a disastrous
shortfall in food production. Two-thirds of the population of Rwanda was unable
to meet even the minimum food energy requirement of 2,100 calories per person
per day. The average person was getting just 1,900 calories-becoming gradually
weaker and at the same time more desperate. Nor were there any readily
available alternatives to subsistence farming. By the end of the 1980s, the
unemployment rate for rural adults had reached 30 percent.

Throughout the
1980s, the worsening of the rural situation, especially in the south where most
of the poor farmers lived, had generated increasing resentment against the Hutu
government, which was accumulating wealth for its mostly northern elite. It's
important to keep in mind that the peasants and the people in power were both
mainly Hutu, so this resentment was an economic, not ethnic, concern. At the
end of the decade, however, with internal strife splitting the Hutus, the
Tutsi-led rebels in Uganda judged that this would be a good time to declare
full-scale war against the regime.

By 1990, then, the Rwandan peasants were being stricken by
both starvation and war. In an interview with Radio Rwanda, representatives of
a peasant association named Twibumbe Bahinzi
declared:

"There is a generalized famine in the country, that is
difficult to eradicate because it is only the cultivators-pastoralists
[peasants] who are bearing its impacts while the ‘educated' [the elite] are
enjoying its side effects. Those who should assist us in combating that famine
are of no use to us.... It will require no less than a revolution similar to that
of 1959.... On top of this there is war. Even if the cultivators-pastoralists can
still till the land, it is very difficult for them to work in good conditions
when they have spent the night guarding the roadblocks, and are not sure that
they are going to harvest...."

In retrospect, this statement confirms that even under the
added stress of war, the peasants did not at this point consider ethnicity to
be the issue. It was still an issue of rich and poor, or north and south.

In 1991, with divisions among the Hutus getting worse,
president Habyarimana was forced to abandon the one-party rule and allow a
multi-party government. But he continued to hold on to the presidency. Some of
the splinter groups tried to weaken him by recruiting bands of disaffected
youths based in the south, who mounted a sporadic uprising and perpetrated acts
of vandalism aimed at destabilizing the regime. The groups were called Inkuba,
or "thunder," and Abakombozi, or "liberators."

The splinter group leaders spurred on these youths by
linking their deprivation to the accumulation of land by the northern elite and
its allies. It wasn't that simple, of course. There were other factors,
including a collapse in the world market for coffee in the 1980s, which dropped
the value of Rwandan coffee exports from $60 per capita in the late 1970s to
$13 by 1991. But the political targeting evidently succeeded. A study of the
patterns of Inkuba and Abakombozi acts of violence shows that these acts
occurred most frequently in the areas with lowest income, most often in places
where daily food energy intake had fallen below 1,500 calories per person. In
fact, a table showing the average food energy production in each of Rwanda's 10
prefectures shows that incidents of sociopolitical violence occurred in 18
communes (communities) where food production was under 1,600 calories per day,
but in none where it was above that level (see Table 2).

The Hutus in power, fearful of losing their government
positions and properties, also recruited young men for their protection. A
youth wing of the governing party, the Interahamwe, was organized to protect
the politicians and their lands from the opposition youths and from the large
numbers of squatters who had fled their impoverished hillsides. In some cases,
the Interahamwe "re-liberated" land that the youth groups of the opposition
parties based in the south had seized or occupied.

Habyarimana worked hard to deflect the peasant opposition,
personally lobbying farmer representatives to rally the peasant movement to his
side and to abandon their rhetoric about rural poverty. He accomplished this by
promising them that their concerns would be addressed, and by letting his
supporters help them to deflect their anger from the elite Hutus to the
attacking Tutsis. By 1991, the Uganda-based Tutsi army was making that strategy
easy for Habyarimana, as it was targeting Hutus in its guerrilla attacks. By
now, thousands of Hutus were fleeing the war and the famine, and had become
"internally displaced persons" (IDPs) gathering in refugee camps. The Tutsi
rebels were more than happy to treat the camps as military targets. By the time
a cease-fire took place in 1992, the IDP population had reached 500,000. But
the cease-fire was short-lived, as the plane crash that killed Habyarimana
immediately reignited the war. By 1993, the number of refugees had reached 1
million, and by the end of the war about 100,000 had died. It was during this
post-assassination period that the worst of the genocidal acts occurred.

The internally
displaced persons, rather than finding themselves taken in and protected by
fellow Hutus whose districts they had fled to, found themselves resented. There
were too many of them, and they put impossible strains on traditional
hospitality. Where population pressure had become increasingly unbearable on
the farms, it became worse around the refugee camps, with IDPs adding heavily
to host populations. As the war escalated, food energy dropped to 1,100
calories per person. And while the IDPs were increasingly resented by their
fellow Hutus (the host populations, too, were now hungry), they were
increasingly attacked and killed by invading Tutsis.

In the two years before his plane was shot down, the
embattled Habyarimana and his political enemies both took political advantage
of the Hutu refugees' desperate circumstances. IDP children and teenagers, with
no schools to occupy them and often no parents to guide them, became the
principal recruiting base for the Interahamwe militias-the ones bent on
sabotaging and destabilizing the regime. At the same time, as the Tutsi
invaders drove more Hutus from their homes, and killed more of them as they
fled to the camps, the IDPs also provided a base for Habyarimana's retaliation
against the Tutsi, and enabled him to reclaim some of the support he'd lost in
the rich-poor conflict. For many of the Hutu IDPs, the harsh reality was that
they were forced to choose between two warring camps: the camp of those who
wanted them to die before voting, and the camp of those who wanted their votes
before they died.

When the presidential plane crashed, it in a sense
prefigured the crash of Rwandan society. Extremist Hutu politicians seized on
the shock and fear of the moment, using the presidential guard and the
Interahamwe, comprising mostly the Hutu youths from IDP camps near Kigali, to
perpetrate the murder of rival Hutu politicians and the mass slaughter of the
Tutsi. Their efforts to turn back the Tutsi failed, and by mid July 1994, the
Tutsi-led RPF had taken over. Following this takeover, more than 2 million Hutu
refugees fled to neighboring countries, including 1.2 million to the Democratic
Republic of Congo (DRC). The mass exodus, predictably, had a devastating
environmental, social, and political impact on the DRC.

In the report I wrote for the IUCN's Task Force on
Environment and Security, I suggested that four lessons be learned from this
tragic chapter in Africa's history:

First, rapid population growth is the major driving force
behind the vicious circle of environmental scarcities and rural poverty. In
Rwanda it induced the use of marginal lands on steep hillsides, shortening of
fallow, deforestation, and soil degradation-and resulted in severe shortages of
food.

Second, conserving the environment is essential for
long-term poverty reduction. Consequently, it is essential for the long-term
elimination of links between environment scarcity and conflict. In the long
term, this is possible only if Rwanda adopts a bold population policy with
aggressive family planning programs aimed at reducing the country's fertility
rate. The pressures that produce conflict can also be reduced by adopting more
sustainable forms of agriculture, based on techniques that improve soil
fertility and increase fuel wood production.

Third, to break the links between environmental scarcities
and conflict, win-win solutions-providing all sociological groups with access
to natural resources-are essential. The winner-take-all model results in a
society gripped by fear, which too easily is exploited by unscrupulous
politicians, leading to ethnic enmity and violence.

And fourth, to prevent a bipolar ethnic conflict of the kind
that ravaged Rwanda will require a rethinking of what national security really
means. Certainly, it means placing human and environmental security ahead of
the security of ethno-political regimes.

The Warning

"It can be concluded that if the country does not operate
profound transformations in its agriculture, it will not be capable of feeding
adequately its population under the present growth rate. Contrary to the
tradition of our demographers who show that the population growth rate will
remain positive over several years in the future, one can not see how the
Rwandan population will reach 10 million inhabitants unless important progress
in agriculture as well as other sectors of the economy were achieved.

Consequently it is time to fear the Malthusian effects that
could derive from the gap between food supply and the demand of the population,
and social disorders which could result from there."

-Report of the National Agriculture Commission (1990-1991),
chaired by James Gasana